Books: At the Library

Phil Robinson is a fiction specialist and member of the information services staff at Cambridge Libraries. He recommends:

Life Goes On, by Hans Keilson, translated from German by Damion Searls.

(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 272 pages, $17 softcover)

Written when the author Hans Keilson was 23, Life Goes On is an autobiographical first novel that tells the story of the Seldersen family, Jewish shop owners struggling to survive economically in a small German town in the years prior to the Nazi takeover.

First published in 1933 (and banned in 1934), the book is now available in English for the first time. It reads like a time capsule and it makes the case for fiction that is made of the author’s own time: Life Goes On is far more prescient and powerful than any historical fiction that purports to animate the past that I’ve read.

It is both a coming-of-age story and the story of the slow unravelling and disintegration of German society. Keilson’s spare prose is naturalistic, measured, probing and utterly convincing. Clearly, this was one of the best novels of 2012.

Books: At the Library

WhatsOnJan 04, 2013Waterloo Region Record

Phil Robinson is a fiction specialist and member of the information services staff at Cambridge Libraries. He recommends:

Life Goes On, by Hans Keilson, translated from German by Damion Searls.

(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 272 pages, $17 softcover)

Written when the author Hans Keilson was 23, Life Goes On is an autobiographical first novel that tells the story of the Seldersen family, Jewish shop owners struggling to survive economically in a small German town in the years prior to the Nazi takeover.

First published in 1933 (and banned in 1934), the book is now available in English for the first time. It reads like a time capsule and it makes the case for fiction that is made of the author’s own time: Life Goes On is far more prescient and powerful than any historical fiction that purports to animate the past that I’ve read.

It is both a coming-of-age story and the story of the slow unravelling and disintegration of German society. Keilson’s spare prose is naturalistic, measured, probing and utterly convincing. Clearly, this was one of the best novels of 2012.

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Books: At the Library

WhatsOnJan 04, 2013Waterloo Region Record

Phil Robinson is a fiction specialist and member of the information services staff at Cambridge Libraries. He recommends:

Life Goes On, by Hans Keilson, translated from German by Damion Searls.

(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 272 pages, $17 softcover)

Written when the author Hans Keilson was 23, Life Goes On is an autobiographical first novel that tells the story of the Seldersen family, Jewish shop owners struggling to survive economically in a small German town in the years prior to the Nazi takeover.

First published in 1933 (and banned in 1934), the book is now available in English for the first time. It reads like a time capsule and it makes the case for fiction that is made of the author’s own time: Life Goes On is far more prescient and powerful than any historical fiction that purports to animate the past that I’ve read.

It is both a coming-of-age story and the story of the slow unravelling and disintegration of German society. Keilson’s spare prose is naturalistic, measured, probing and utterly convincing. Clearly, this was one of the best novels of 2012.